Spooked - The Banker

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

When Antonio and his sister Anita were growing up in Texas, their family didn’t have much money. That’s why they were so excited to move into their very own home, even if it was a little run-down. It turns out, the home already had an occupant.  Thank you, Antonio and Anita, for sharing your story with Spooked! Produced by Anne Ford, original score by Renzo Gorrio, artwork by Teo Ducot Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A tisket, a taskin. I trapped him in the basket. He begged for me to set him free. But I knew he would come for me. But listen to Spooked. Stay. The young child, I felt that my parents, my mother and my father, I felt they loved me very much.

I did, truly. It was just the day. and those people from their church they were fighting something titanic something urgent demonic because their apostle Herbert W. Armstrong preached that this was

the end of days and they had to meet with each other. Had to pray to fast, to study their Bibles, to listen to cassette tapes from the headquarters church in Pasadena, California and run the farm. Farms, even failing farms like ours

do not run themselves. So they worked and they worked and they worked from sun up to far past sundown. Every night with the exhaustion, I heard the fear, the terror behind my father's goodnight apologies. Don't worry, he promised. The kingdom of God will be here soon. Then we'll have all eternity to play ball and go swimming and climb trees. It was okay.

But I didn't mind. And it was true I didn't mind. Even as he asked forgiveness for not having the time to spend on me, I just wanted to be alone. I like being alone because I never felt alone. I saw them mostly out of the corner of my eye. The shadows, the shapes and figures darting in and out of sight. Sometimes they would even make themselves plain.

Women, men, my grandmother, even a baby once. Other stuff, I knew this was my secret that my mother and father would holler and weep and call for a pastor if I told them who really kept me company. They would say I can sort of with the very demons they fought every single day through their prayers and their fasting. They would call the pastor for an exorcism to cast them all away, and I couldn't have that. I wouldn't. So I kept my world hidden. Never breathed the word about who I really spent my time with. And that's why, when the darting shadows shrank from, warned of a new force in my periphery,

something that chased the laughter and the light, something that radiated an evil I had never encountered before, something that for the very first time scared me, scared me. I had kept my secrets. My name is when Washington. Spook starts. Who makes you feel safe? When Antonio and his sister Anita were growing up in Texas, their family didn't have much money. That's why they were so excited to move into their very own home. Even if it was a little bit run down.

The people that my parents bought from lived there for about 50 years. So it just got in disrepair. Often you pull a pack the wallpaper and you see an old article from the Eastern European Gazette that we'd never heard of as kids. We just thought the words look funny and, you know, picked it off the wall. When the family moved in, Antonio was only three, and Anita was a newborn. So their parents decided that all four of them should share a bedroom. Anita in her crib and Antonio in a bed against the wall.

I'm five or six years old, and one night in my bed, I decide to look to my doorway, and there's a man standing in the doorway who I couldn't really tell who it was. beckoned me to follow. I want to know who it is, but then in the exact same breath, I don't want to know who it is. I get up out of the bed. I start walking.

I can only see just the shape of the person just haze beyond. And as I get to where I think I'm going to interact with this figure, the haze turns to darkness. I then realized that I'm standing on the floor furnace, the great searing through my feet, and my parents find me, screaming. My parents just look at me bewildered, wondering, why did you do that?

And I didn't really know. I couldn't. I was just kind of gobsmapped thinking, well, who was I following? The whole family was shaken after Antonio's injury, especially after he told them that he'd been following someone. But no one had been in the house. There was no intruder. So Antonio's parents dropped it, and life went on.

And as the children grew older, it no longer made sense for everyone to sleep in the same bedroom. So it is summer, and so neighborhood kids, friends of the family, family members, our cousins. We were all playing in this very large room in the house. And my grandmother was looking after us. But I keep looking up into the corner, and I keep seeing this man standing there, and he's staring at us. He has dark black hair.

It's slicked back. He's wearing a suit, which is strange because it's in the middle of the summer. He's standing very straight with his arms, alongside his body, and he's not moving. He's just standing in this corner, and he's staring at us and staring at me. nobody else seems to think there's anything wrong happening.

They don't feel creeped out in the same way that I feel creeped out. And he doesn't look like anyone I know. He doesn't look like any of my relatives. And I keep looking over at my grandmother. She's not reacting to him. And I say, Grandma, who's that man in the corner? And she says, want man in the corner. And I said, that man who's just standing there, staring at us.

She quietly gathers up all of the little kids and gets us out of the room. That was the first time I experienced seeing the banker. What Anita and Antonio didn't know at the time was that back in the 1920s, a wealthy banker had built the house as a love letter to his wife. He chose the finest furnishings, imported wallpaper from France. In the backyard, fruit trees blossom. over a coy pond. And for many years, everything was beautiful. But when the banker and his wife died,

they left no children to maintain them. Anita, Antonio, and their parents moved into a house that had fallen into decay. After Anita saw him, she and her grandma knew someone was lingering in the house, but they didn't talk about it. No one in the family did. And Anita thinks she knows why.

The Mexican side of the family is, I feel in touch with the spiritual world. And it's fairly normal to speak to your ancestors and for sometimes for them to speak back to you. And that's a very positive thing, you know. But if it's a stranger, if it's someone not in your family, then it's less clear what to do about it. Only a year or so later, Antonio's dad was out of town on business. Antonio was getting ready for bed. I was about 10 years old, and I feel a presence near the bed. And I think, well, maybe it's one of my parents.

Maybe my dad's come home and just wants to see that I'm sleeping restfully. But as I look towards the foot of my bed, there's nobody standing there. I look towards the door, there's a figure just standing, not speaking. And I think not to speak because, hey, it's my dad. Maybe I should fake that I'm asleep. And I think I'm going to rotate to the side and fall myself to sleep. In the morning when I asked my mother, hey, what time did Dad get home? She looks at me, what do you mean?

I said, yeah, what time did he get home? He was there checking on me. Her face loses a bit of color. No, Antonio, he's still in Kennedy, Texas. Her eyes water a bit. She kind of shakes her head and walks off, knowing what we never really wanted to talk about, that the spirit visited again. But about a week later, Antonio's mom brought the subject up herself out of nowhere.

She says, he's been here before. My sister's there. We're in the kitchen. We're looking at my mom, what do you mean? And mom says, when you and you're little, you'd ask you about a man you'd see in the hall. Last week, that was him. And so my sister asked, what do you mean, mom? Who is him?

Well, we don't really know his name, but it's the banker. For the first time, she's verifying something that I knew all along. We now have a name for the person that is visited. So then she relays the story to us that one night, probably when I was about four or five, she's reading a book, I'm dozing off, she decides to lay down next to me, and she dozes off. All of a sudden, she feels pressure. She tries to awake and there's somebody putting pressure on her shoulders,

but she can't see anybody. And she feels a presence. She said she felt the presence of a man. And as she tries to call out, she feels pressure of a hand on her face, almost to the point of suffocation. And the only thing that releases suffocation is my little child eyes awaking and looking over

and then the pressure released as she gasped her air. And apparently I asked what was wrong. and she played it off like nothing happened. We were like, well, you know, hey mom, why are you telling us this now? And secondly, why haven't you done anything about it? Is it going to attack me? Because I don't know how you fight this thing.

I think Ghostbusters had probably been around at that point, so we wanted her to strap on a proto pack and go take him out. My dad arrives back at the house. My sister and I confront him. We want to know what mom said is true. He looks over at my mom. mom, and my mom kind of just motions to him, they know about him.

My dad, who's a deacon in the church, he says, okay, he seems to be like he's disturbed, that we now know something that they've tried to protect us from. And my dad looks over at my mother and he says, well, what we're going to do is something very simple, bless the house. So we all proceed through the house ceremoniously. We go to the front door. He came in with the, this golden bucket that has sort of a scepter-looking thing that's in it, and it's full of

holy water. And it has a wand at the end, and he'd pull this wand out of the bucket, and start flinging the wand into the different corners of the room and praying. And then he does the sign of the cross, turns around, we're now in the living room, blesses the top of the door, walks through each room, blesses the top of the door. And as he proceeds to my room, he says, this is where we'll end. I was nervous and I was uncomfortable, but I did feel a little comfort like they knew what they were doing. And he gets a small book. And we look, because it's not the Bible. And it's a book that has the word writes on it. He starts murmuring some prayer that my sister and I don't understand. Part of it's in Latin. So he blesses his.

door that I've seen the man over and over and over he just looks at us it should be good now we're done but then you kind of think well he has this book he knows about this so he's probably done this before so how long does it last how much time do we have so there's one night i'm now 11 years old and as i'm drifting off to sleep i get a sense that somebody walks into my room so i really weakly call up mom Mom? Dad, who's over there? And nobody answers. So all the hair stands up on my back,

and I can just see in the moonlight somebody's standing no less than three to four inches from my face in an old tweed suit with the little pocket for the stopwatch. I immediately think to myself, Dad didn't fix it. I look up, and as right as I'm about to get to, the face and it as this hand came and covered my eyes. Not touching me, but just where you can feel the

electricity, if you will, of somebody right next to your face. Your eyelashes almost just brushing the hand. It's just letting me know, I'm not leaving. You try any ceremony you want. This is my house. And I'm petrified. So I move my head and it tracks with my head movement. But I can't see directly in front of me. And I don't want to push my head for it. I don't want to touch it.

I know what you're going to do. We're going to turn on the lights. I'm going to see whoever this is. And when the moment I made that decision, the darkness cleared, and it was back to just dark room, not pitch black. So I leap to my feet. I walk as quickly as I can, the 10 feet to my light switch. And I don't want to look back. I don't want to look back.

I want to hip that switch. And so I go and I flip the switch and I turn around. and at the same time I go, gotcha, the damn light ball bust. I'm like, oh my God. So I carefully plot my next plan. I'm going to go into the hallway, and this time I'm going to turn

at the same time I flip the switch. So I go to the hallway. I very slowly turn. I've got my hand on the switch, and I'm ready to just say, gotcha, I hit the switch, and then you hear that. And so I get to my sister's room

about four feet further down the hall. I reached into room and go to flip the switch. light switch. It had already bursted. It wouldn't even turn on. I sat next to her her bed and just slept sitting there. That is how my parents found me. It was clear now. Their dad's prayers in holy water hadn't worked at all. I wanted to ask my dad many times, why didn't it work? Why didn't it just fix the problem? But I felt a certain amount of guilt, like, well, maybe it's because if I only believed as much as my dad it would work.

Eventually, Anita and Antonio moved out of the house. They went to college, started their own lives. But their parents still lived there. And now that they were empty nesters, they started using Antonio's old bedroom as a TV lounge. And so my mom would often go in there to watch shows. She likes telenovelas and movies. And so when I came home, I said, why don't we create? a nice space for you here.

The wallpaper's falling down. The carpet's pretty gross. It's not in a good shape. So we decided to renovate my brother's room and moved all the furniture out of the room, tore off all the wallpaper, tore up all the carpeting, whitewashed everything. We moved everything back in.

And my mother really, really loved it. I did stutter a little bit thinking of myself, well, what if they change something that's not supposed to be changed? changed? What if they move something that doesn't want to be moved? Well, what if you, hmm, nah, I better not. It's probably for the best. And if it happens, at least I don't live there anymore. But only six months later. Ten days before Christmas, we were getting ready to come home. We're making our flight plans. And we get a call and my mom says, you need to turn on the news.

The whole house is on fire. She's distraught. And when I turn it on, there's somebody standing in front of our house that I grew up in saying 10 days before Christmas, family tragedy. And I'm in disbelief because there's two fire trucks like you would see in a movie with the flames shooting out the top of our house, like a bomb was dropped. When the fire started, the parents were asleep. After the smoke woke them up, they got out just in time to watch their house burn. We later on talk to the fire inspector and he goes, man, This is something I don't normally see. And so my dad and I ask him, well, what do you mean?

He says, well, this is an electrical fire. Okay, so why is that unusual? Well, because of this, and he pushes away a bit of debris, and we look on the wall, and there's a wall plug, an outlet, which is in perfect, clear, non-burnt shape. He says, well, this is the origin, and all the memories flood back, the origin of where my feet were burned,

the origin of where the second light ball burst, the origin of where I always saw him, the man, the banker. That was the room, that was the precious room. And we literally ripped everything out of it, and I think it was the final straw. My parents would never come out and say that the ghost started the fire. But we know it had to have been the ghost.

There's no way it was someone else. For Anita, it felt like the worst possible ending to her family's struggle with the banker. I think we all lost. The banker loved that house. And now they don't even get that house anymore. So everyone loses. I'm thinking to myself, well, hey, the spirit's probably gone.

And so maybe this fire was the opportunity to cleanse the spirit from the earth plane. to wherever they're going. And then I ask, where are you going to go, Mom? Where are you going to go, Dad? Are you going to go somewhere else? You have the opportunity to move anywhere you want in the city. And they say, no, we're going to rebuild.

And since you're an architect, we want you to do it. I think to myself, wow, that would be great, but also scared. But what if we bring it back? Visiting my home after the fire, walking to the house to see what we can salvage. And I look up to the sky, a leaf from the tree hits me in the face. And I think to myself, what if I built and designed a house that's open to the sky? And so that then became the design idea for the new house, a courtyard house, one that you would see in Mexico. It has an open-air courtyard to simultaneously honor, but also not allow the spirits to be in there anymore.

I had the opportunity to create and put the position of the bedrooms far away from any, experience that my sister and I had with regard to any sightings, any spirit. I designed it such that that room will never be enclosed ever to try to give poetic release and spiritual release to whoever's there and say, hey, you know, this is still your space, but we are going to occupy the rest of it. What I thought about when I entered that courtyard for the first time is this is a truth. If this can't be my parents' house, it can't be your house either. And so that courtyard to me was an offering, an olive branch, say, look, nobody's going to have this.

This is going to be no man's land. Come and go as you please, just leave my parents alone. I do honestly feel that the banker has moved on. I don't sense him anymore. It does seem like it worked, but I still have dreams about that room. Wake it up in my room with the door open. halfway cracked and there's somebody there. Antonio and Anita, we are so glad your family is safe and so glad.

You shared your story with us at Spooked. Original score for that piece was by Renzel Gorio. It was produced by Ann Ford of spooksters. Did you ever move an object with your mind? See someone or something passed through a brick wall? Feel desperate eyes searching for you in the dark experiences. you can't tell anyone about? Well, tell me, I want to know.

Spooked at snapjudgment.org because there is nothing better than a spooked story from a spooked listener. Spooked at snapjudgment.org. Show the dark side you spook with some spook gear, the t-shirt of your dreams available right now at snapjudgment.org. And remember, if you like storytelling,

that will never leave you afraid, get the amazing, stupendous snap judgment podcast, It's storytelling with the beat. This book was created by the team that trust everyone at some point to do the right thing, except for Mark Ristich. There's Anna Sussman, our chief spooksters, Eliza Smith, Chris Hanbrick, Annie Nguyen Nguyen Morae, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Davy Kim, Renzogorio, Teo de Kott, Marissa D'Ate, Marissa D'Aude,

Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims. Spook theme song. It's by Pat Machine Me Miller. My name is Gun Washington And we like to think that In our darkest moments The times of fear of horror There will always be someone else there to share the burden

To carry the load A parent A friend, a relative, a spouse Let me tell you And no uncertain terms that on this Thought path you walk alone And you need to enlist every tool Every trick, every favor

At your disposal to make this journey No one else can do it for you, which is why I advise in no uncertain terms to never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever.